Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

This Project Gutenberg volume collects two short dialogues that Cicero wrote in 44 BC and dedicated to his friend Atticus, given here in E. S. Shuckburgh's translation. Each puts its argument in the mouth of a revered Roman of an earlier age: Gaius Laelius, called 'the wise,' discusses friendship with his two sons-in-law shortly after the death of Scipio Africanus the younger, and old Marcus Cato tells the young Scipio and Laelius why age has never seemed a weight to him. The same circle joins the two works, since the pair who question Cato are the friends whose bond the other dialogue mourns and celebrates.

On Friendship opens with grief carried well. Laelius mourns Scipio without despair, convinced that no evil has befallen his friend, and the talk turns to what their friendship was. He defines friendship as a complete accord on all subjects, human and divine, joined with mutual goodwill and affection, and counts it, wisdom excepted, the best gift the immortal gods have given man. Its origin is not weakness or want, as some philosophers taught, but nature: love kindled when we see virtue in another person. Advantage does come, yet it follows friendship rather than causing it, which is why connections built on profit dissolve as soon as the profit moves.

From that origin come the rules. The first law is to ask of friends, and to do for friends, only what is good. The plea 'for friendship's sake' excuses nothing: Blossius, who said he would have burned the Capitol had Tiberius Gracchus asked it, is Laelius's warning case. Friends owe one another candid advice without bitterness and patience in receiving it, since flattery, which says whatever pleases, is the poison of the whole bond. Choose slowly and test character before giving affection, put yourself on a level with your friend whatever the difference in rank, and if a friendship must end, let it be unstitched rather than torn apart.

On Old Age is built as a defense. Cato names the four reasons age is called unhappy: it withdraws us from active employment, enfeebles the body, deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures, and stands near death. He answers them in order. Public life runs on deliberation, character, and judgment, like the steersman who holds the tiller while younger men climb the masts. The body keeps what training and temperance preserve, so age should be fought like an illness and the mind fed like a lamp. Losing the appetites of youth is a release rather than a loss, freeing a man for conversation, for study, and for the pleasures of farming, which Cato praises at loving length; and the crowning grace of old age is influence, the respect earned by honorable conduct in earlier days.

The last charge receives the longest answer. Death is either the end of all sensation, and so nothing to fear, or the passage of an immortal soul to better company, and so something to hope for. An old man's death is ripeness: the apple that drops instead of being torn green from the branch, the fire that burns down of itself, the long voyage finally sighting land and coming into port. Cato leaves life as he would an inn, not a home. Both dialogues end on the same demand. These goods are arts rather than accidents: friendship must be founded on virtue and tested judgment, old age must be established on foundations laid in youth, and Laelius's parting advice ranks virtue first and friendship next to it.